Social Media as Data

Twitter as Qualitative Data

Outline• Internet as a research site

• Why Twitter and how to analyse it qualitatively

• UKIP and Energy

• Rural topics, turbines and climate change

• Final thoughts

Internet as a site of research

• Organic food websites, focus groups and interviews

• Months to collect websites, Atlas.ti software

• Nutrigenetics technologies, websites, interviews and media coverage

• High pictorial content of sites, Nvivo software

Social Media • Quantitative approaches

• Sentiment analysis, volume analysis, key actors

• Qualitative hampered by that volume

• Representativeness

• Sampling strategy

• Tendency to study users not actual use.

Facebook vs Twitter• Facebook

• Friends, daily personal news

• Reporting difficult, semi-private

• Twitter

• Wider networks, frequent, issue facing

• Public, signposting

What are people doing on Twitter?

• Linking

• Other people (@myfriend)

• Wider debates (#takepart)

• Other media (hyperlink)

• Creating messages

Nvivo NCapture

• Allowing limited capture of Twitter

• Saving webpages as PDFs and html files

• In Twitter hyperlinks remain active.

• Easy to capture entire Twitter feeds

UKIP• Opposition to renewables and alone in that in

major political parties

• Initial statements about preserving rural places and landscape

• 2013 this opposition joined to policy statements about nuclear options sovereign wealth fund

• Farage - ‘This Loopy Idea’ - Radio 4

@RogerHelmer• Collected entire Twitter feed (4912 tweets)

• Sample of 1000 - Oct 2012 - Oct 2013

• 114 linked texts recovered

Linking to other Twitter users

• Little use of hashtags

Rural Topics…• Pro-Hunting• RSPCA blows £330,000 of charity money persecuting the Heythrop Hunt.

Sensible people will resolve never to give them another penny. (Helmer, Tweet, 19 December 2012)

• Boxing day greetings to Hunt Supporters everywhere. I’m planning to get to the Fernie Meet in Great Bowden. (Helmer, Tweet, 26 December 2013)

• Anti-litter• Seems we’ve inspired a new generation of cyclists. But are they leaving the

empty Red Bull cans along country lanes? (Helmer, Tweet, 07 August 2012)

TurbinesNational Trust: ‘Turbines have grace & beauty.’ No they don’t. They have waste & subsidy. (Helmer, Tweet, 25 February 2013)

Friends of the Earth Spokesman: ‘We don’t want an energy policy that wrecks our green & pleasant land.’ He must mean wind farms. (Helmer, Tweet, 05 August 2013)

Here we go again. Greens implacably opposed to industry, jobs, prosperity. (Helmer, Tweet, 28 September 2013)

@ret_ward Because they are despoiling our countryside. driving up energy prices, and undermining our economic competitiveness. (Helmer, Tweet, 05 August 2013)

Most of all, I hate wind turbines because they’re symbols of monstrous pointless waste, and futile political correctness. (Helmer, Tweet, 01 July 2012)

Climate Change• Climate alarmism: Why we should challenge the ‘scientific consensus’

(web link). And how money drives green attitudes. (Helmer, Tweet, 07 October 2013)

• Linked media

• “IPCC lead author Dr Richard Linden has accused it of having ‘sunk to a level of hilarious incoherence. Nigel Lawson has called it “not science but mumbo jumbo”’. The Global Warming Policy Foundation’ Dr David Whitehouse has described the IPCC’s panel as ‘evasive and inaccurate’ in the way it tried to dodge the key issue of the 15-year at least pause in global warming”. (Delingpole 6 October 2013)

Local Media • Very few articles - mostly the letters pages, UKIP electoral candidates

• UKIP has taken a stand and rural communities are voting for their candidates because of their antiwind farm views. In rural communities traditional Conservatives have had enough and the sooner local and national government realise this [the] better. I am pleased my newly elected county councillor is from UKIP. (Lane-Ley, 2013)

• Of course it is imperative to properly research whether the current climate change is part of the natural rhythm or accelerated by the intervention of humanity. (Rapsey, 2013).

• No presence apart from that they assert

And Finally• UKIP not campaigning on rural topics

• Looking to find opportunities to discuss climate change denial

• Skilled and targeted use of Twitter• Right wing and populist messaging

• Effort put into creating content• Importance of claims in contemporary politics

Matt Reed

• mreed@glos.ac.uk

• @ReedMtweet

• Www.ccri.ac.uk